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We Love Katamari Review
Balbanes writes "Tim Rogers reviews We Love Katamari. He calls it Katamari Damashii: The Videogame." The original is probably my favorite non World of Warcraft game in the last year or two. I can't wait for this game. This article has a lot of commentary on the gameplay, the music, and more. And really, if you haven't played it the original you owe it to yourself to try. The infectious music and hysterical gameplay are a serious treat.
Was posted yesterday the link can be found here
In response to the "spam" claims, and general distaste for the style of article, I'd like to pose an alternate perception. Katamari Damashi is one of the all-time under-the-radar hits for any console (perhaps any game). Every person I know who has a PS/2 had not heard of it before I started passing it around. Everyone loved it. It is brilliant in its simplicity.
In addition, it came out new at $20. An outstanding market concept that few if any had really tried - a new game that was cheap to develop, with little or no marketing, priced to sell. An unfortunate side effect is that there was very little big media attention payed.
As for the part about fawning over the larger scope of the game - the original was short. Necessarily so given the target of a cheap-to-create, cheap-on-the-shelf game.
It's a good game, And the review is fair and accurate.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Not sure how close it is to the original, but I'm certain the original one is much better if folks are liking it so much.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
... and want to know what drugs this guy takes.
I liked the original game quite a bit. It was short, clever, fun to play. Even "innovative". However, I find it *scary* that the guy spent that many bytes fretting over so many minor details. In the end he could have said:
"The sequel is better technically but perhaps a bit overproduced (particularly in terms of music) for what it is. Fans of the original will enjoy the cleaner level design and improvements, but it doesn't stray far from the original. People who missed the first game shouln't miss it them time. 8 out of 10"
Sig under construction since 1998.
C'mon, what's a videogame review without screenshots? Here's some for the curious, courtesy of IGN.. http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/716/716651/imgs_1.h tml
Half way through the first paragraph I wanted to shoot myself just to make him shut up. Then I remembered the back button. That was close.
You made it that far?! I'm impressed. I started skipping around thinking "it can't ALL be mindless drivel".
I believe was wrong. I'm not sure because I refuse to read it all just to prove a point. But, I'm fairly confident about it.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Find out more about the original here.
In general, the game is about you controlling a "prince" who has to replace all the stars in the sky. He does this by rolling around a "Katamari", which objects stick to. When you start out, you've got a 1 cm tall Katamari, and you're rolling over thumbtacks and coins. As you collect items, the Katamari gets bigger, and can pick up bigger items. So the mouse that was chasing you around and knocking items off your Katamari eventually finds itself PART of the Katamari.
And the great part is that the items don't just disappear into the Katamari - they're all quite visible on the outside, and actually affect how the Katamari rolls. Grab a pencil, and suddenly it doesn't roll well at all in the direction of the pencil, and you need to roll a different way to even it out.
The later stages are really fun - you can start off rolling items sitting under the car next to a house, to rolling over items around the car, to rolling up the pets, then the owner of the house, then the car itself, then the house.
It really is an amazing game.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Why do people insist on spelling it "Damashii"? "Damacy" is the official transliteration of the name used by the original creators of the game; who can overrule that?
Heh, I made it as far as the third paragraph, I think... He was still droning on about the soundtrack being sung in an annoying voice, and how whatever her name was matured into a diva, and how she would've been a better choice for the soundtrack etc... Really, I got the point the first time... After that, I gave up. I was curious about the game, but not THAT curious...
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
There's a much wider variety of objectives this time. All of the major level types from the first game are back (the infamous cow level and infamous bear level have been replaced by the extremely frustrating cow-and-bear level) plus some new ones, asking the player to roll up objects that cost the most, roll up the most flowers or fireflies in super-saturated stages, roll up the most food (the player's ball in this level is actually a sumo wrestler -- this is a highlight of the game), roll up clouds in a level where the ball seems like it's full of helium, an underwater stage with floaty physics, roll up a burning ball while continuing to feed the fire so it doesn't go out, a level where the ball constantly rolls forward at high speed and you can only steer where it goes, one where you get 100 items as fast as you can, one where you try to make the biggest ball you can within 50 items, and best of all, the Cosmos stage, which contains all the planets you made in the previous levels, and have to make a ball bigger than the freaking sun. The collect-the-nations level is back (with a kinder camera this time), but I still can't seem to get them all in time, dammit.
There are still a few size levels, but they seem like less of the thrust of the game this time around. Many levels now feature multiple versions; at least two, maybe it was three, have three versions. (Including the Sumo level, hooray!) Many levels, including most of the raw size levels, have a normal version that works like the prior game, and a time attack version where you can't fail, but the level ends once the target size is reached.
My favorite part of the original game, what I affectionately call The Big Level, the one with the largest scale and the one that makes people say "wow" the most, is now surpassed by The New The Big Level.
The problem with the original The Big Level is that, once you know what you're doing, you can quite easily clean out the whole place, leaving you and your ball alone in an ocean of blue, with four or five minutes left on the clock. Once this happens, you will probably have a ball size of 878m, give or take one meter. And that, as we say, is that. The New The Big Level has a tighter time limit (17 minutes as opposed to 25), and seems a lot harder to max out; I've been up to 2200m+ with no end in sight. One really cool thing: The King of All Cosmos is in the level! He's so large in size that it looks like he'd be super hard to collect... but not impossible.
There is one super-disappointing thing about the game so far, and that is there doesn't seem, at this point, to be any Eternal levels. While I never played the original Eternals more than twice each, The New The Big Level is so vast (featuring capsule versions of several countries: you gotta love a game containing the Hollywood Sign, the Effiel Tower and the Great Wall of China, among others) that I can't help but think the only way you could get everything is without a time limit.
As for the music... it's great, but not at catchy as the first game. It's growing on me, though. It has at least three really nice songs. The beatbox version of Katamari On The Rock, surprisingly, isn't as engaging as the originsl (which, unlike what the the linked-to review thinks, I think was *wonderful* for the first game's last level theme).
Overall it's a worthy sequel. It doesn't seem to have as much of the odd grandeur of the original game, but the Cosmos stage is *awesome*. There are so many clever little touches: for example, the "NA" "M" and "CO" letters from the save screen, as well as the (R) symbol, are on the Collection screen! (I'll leave it to you to figure out how to get them all on one file....) I wish it focused more on size objectives, but there's still a lot to like here.
The game, it must be said, is ultimately just more levels of the same, but considering the the original was one of those games that was just *begging* to have more levels added to it, I'm not complaining. If there's room for disap